Some advice if you're driving without auto insurance: Beware the repo man.

Beginning on Oct. 1, the state will send licensed recovering agents, or "repo men," into the streets of Broward, Dade and Hillsborough counties to search for uninsured cars.

When they find one, they'll unbolt the license plate and slap a sticker on the windshield telling the owner his license has been suspended. It will cost $166.60 to get it back - $150 to reinstate the license and $16.60 for a new plate, plus the cost of buying insurance.

The "tag recovery" system, as it's known to the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, is a one-year pilot program designed to crack down on uninsured drivers. And there are plenty of them.

State officials estimate that at least 10 to 15 percent of Florida motorists - perhaps as many as 25 percent - are uninsured.

The Legislature selected Broward, Dade and Hillsborough - three of the most urban areas of the state - for the pilot program and will expand it to the rest of Florida next year if it's successful.

The state wants uninsured motorists off the streets for a couple of reasons. First, it's against the law to drive without insurance. And second, uninsured drivers push up insurance premiums for other drivers.

But police don't have time to track uninsured motorists, officials say. They need help. That's where the repo men come in.

"It's similar to the meter maid kind of thing," said Jerry Burnette, owner of Fort Lauderdale Auto Recovery. "Cops don't have enough time to write out parking tickets, not like they did 25 years ago. So now they have civilians doing it."

The state still is writing the procedures for the program, but Janet Dennis, public information administrator for the motor vehicles department, said her agency will write to all the licensed recovery agencies in Florida outlining the plan.

If the agencies are interested, they'll fill out a form. And each month, the state will send them a computer disk or a printout listing uninsured motorists, their addresses and their license plate numbers.

Each time a recovery agent turns in a license plate from an uninsured vehicle, they stand to make $50 - but only if the motorist gets insurance and reinstates his suspended license.

Some in the repo business think that's a good deal, but Burnette isn't so sure.

"It definitely sounds good, but it's the same old story - if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," he said. "So I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude."

Mostly, he worries about confrontations with unhappy motorists. And given Florida's problems with figuring out who has insurance and who doesn't, the repo men could face a lot of unhappy motorists.

Dennis said the state relies heavily on insurance companies to identify uninsured drivers. But insurance policies are based on Vehicle Identification Numbers, 17-digit monsters that offer endless opportunities for errors. Numbers can be written incorrectly. No matter: If they don't match the state's records, the driver is considered uninsured.

"It's very easy to make mistakes," Dennis said, "so there might be valid policies out there that we can't tie to a vehicle. There might be instances when someone has insurance and their tag will be removed.

"There's a gap in the records and it's hard for us to know exactly how big that gap is."

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